I’m taking a slightly different route, having also at one time tried to replace the MBP with the iPad. Due to the nature of my work I am in a better position to do so than those with more technical needs.
I would still be inclined to use the iPad for ~90% of my work if the battery life on the MBP was still around 4-6 hours. But with the M1’s battery life of 8-10 hours and its speed, I’m reallocating my work flow between the two devices. Having also settled on my apps of choice (I experimented with and struggled between using Obsidian and Craft but have settled on Craft) here are my basic apps and device utilization.
iPad Usage
- My travel device (I’ve started traveling again, finally)
- Writing when the focus is the text, not research (Scrivener)
- Speaking notes when making presentations (all of my speaking notes are prepared and reside in Scrivener, which works great for speaking notes when in Focus mode)
- Book reading (Kindle app)
- Reading the news (Apple News)
- PDF annotations (PDFPen Pro)
- Meeting notes (Craft)
- Weekly review (OmniFocus)
- Email (Apple Mail)
MBP
- Spreadsheets, budgets, etc. (Excel, Numbers)
- Writing research and complex writing projects (Scrivener, DEVONthink)
- Citation Management (Bookends)
- File management, conversion, OCR, etc
- File backups (Blaze and Time Machine)
- Brainstorming (MindNode)
- Email (Apple Mail)
- Project/task management (OmniFocus)
- Formal paper/proposal development (Word or Pages)
- Slide development (Keynote)
Now, what I will have to decide this fall is whether to stick with the 12.9" iPad or go with the 11". I prefer the smaller size (presentations, meeting notes) but when traveling I prefer the 12.9" because it is functioning as my laptop replacement.